If you watched this story unfold it was corny AF, of course, but most expressions of intimacy on the screen are. I remember cringing at sex scenes when I was young…not just because I was uncomfortable with sex, but also because my young brain knew that it was phony baloney. This relationship, and the way it was brought into the world of bachelor, felt double phony because as a creator or reality TV I could tell that the whole setup was baloney from beginning to end. Yet there is nothing to hate about when the most white-bread-hetero-bastion-of-BS-happily-ever-after tried in earnest to say ‘gay is okay’. That’s a win for all of us, right?
I say yes. But would I be a therapist if I didn’t ask a few questions when I smelled the phony? Like, what if the couple was two men? Would bachelor nation have been okay if one of the hunks jilted a nice girl because he was really actually still in love with his hometown hunk boyfriend? Or even more shocking if two hunks who had come to find marriage on the bachelorette had instead fallen for each other (a male version of what happened on the Vietnamese season of bachelor last year). Would the same red carpet have been rolled out for a male gay train?
This was Bachelor in Paradise, so already the lips are looser and there is a lot more freedom to let your freak flag fly, though there is nothing freaky at all about these fried corn balls. I do think it is telling that it is on the more ‘trashy’ version of the Bachelor universe that this dog-and-pony show was trotted out. It reeks of a franchise wanting to stay relevant and show that they are hip to the social zeitgeist and willing to bend over backwards to show us that they are cool with the gay, only they want to do it at the kids’ table.
Which brings us to porn (aren’t you glad you stuck around?). What has digital technology done for porn? The same thing it’s done for every other genre of media. Anyone with an erotic idea can get their images out and about. As a result there is a lot of porn and a lot of ways to see it. So whatever is being put up for offer is being seen by a lot of people. Naturally the most popular and most common sexual acts and desires will be well known by anyone who consumes pornography regularly. The internet feedback loop guarantees that soon even the homemade pornography will begin to mimic the ‘professional’ stuff because the people at home who are honestly just having sex for fun in front of a camera will eventually be copying sex acts they have seen on camera. This is why every southwest shaman-looking influencer will eventuality be wearing the same hat.
Because this is a patriarchy and sexual norms are, at least on the surface, governed by men, almost all pornography has as its subject women. The most basic male fantasy seems to be a version of ‘I control the body of an attractive woman to do what I wish’. The second is ‘I control the bodies of TWO attractive women to do what I wish’. One woman good, two women better. All of this is to say that the two attractive blondes kissing each other is about as normal and hetero as it gets.
So where does that leave us the viewer? What did we get from this supposedly ground breaking, rule breaking, risky move by the most hetero franchise on earth outside of the NFL? We found out that the audience is okay with two hot blondes kissing and falling in love. Yes, The Bachelor is ‘women’s programming’, but the network will be controlled by the rules of the patriarchy. So what has Reality TV done for me, lately?
I still have a polite side eye until I see two hunks falling for each other.